Tech workers fantasise about AI bosses while building the tools that threaten them
A viral joke about replacing CEOs reveals how Silicon Valley processes its own complicity in workplace automation
Somewhere in the sprawling comment threads of Hacker News, a software developer typed something that crystallised a peculiar moment in the history of work. "Honestly some of the companies I've worked for would be better with Gemini in charge," they wrote, responding to a satirical website promising to replace chief executives with artificial intelligence. "Yes humanity is doomed, but at least I would understand the motivations and we'd have less CEO ADHD moments." The comment accumulated hundreds of upvotes. It touched a nerve that nobody had quite expected.
The website in question, Replace Your Boss, is exactly what you might imagine from the vibe-coded depths of 2025's AI satire industry. Glossy stock photos of confident middle-aged men accompany promises of executives who require "no bonus packages," experience "no mood swings," and offer "ego-free" leadership. The tagline invites users to "stop working for humans." One testimonial from a fictional marketing coordinator reads: "My new boss is just as ruthless and cruel. But now he's an actual robot I don't take it so personally."
The site generated 424 upvotes and 177 comments on Hacker News, far exceeding what such obvious parody typically attracts. Some commenters dismissed it as low-effort content. Others launched into earnest discussions about capitalism, automation, and whether language models could genuinely outperform the executives they report to. A few wondered aloud whether they could build agents to do their own jobs while continuing to collect salaries. The joke had escaped its satirical container and become something stranger: a collective processing session for people who build artificial intelligence and increasingly fear its implications.
The economics of resentment
The satire arrives at a moment when executive compensation has become genuinely difficult to comprehend. In 2024, chief executives of S&P 500 companies earned an average of eighteen million dollars, roughly 281 times what their median employees received. The Economic Policy Institute calculates that CEO pay has grown over a thousand per cent since 1978 while typical worker compensation rose just twenty-six per cent. Starbucks paid its chief executive nearly a hundred million dollars last year, some six thousand times what its median worker earned. The median Starbucks employee would need to start working during the Stone Age to match their boss's annual take.
Against this backdrop, jokes about algorithmic executives carry an edge of genuine grievance. When the Replace Your Boss website promises AI leaders who skip the "yachts, bonuses, and questionable sushi receipts," it lampoons a compensation culture that even business school professors struggle to justify on performance grounds. The humour works because it targets an absurdity everyone recognises but few feel empowered to address directly.
Yet the satire also lands at a moment of extraordinary anxiety within the technology industry itself. Over 182,000 tech workers have been laid off so far in 2025, following similar bloodletting in 2023 and 2024. Companies like Microsoft, Google, and Meta have shed tens of thousands of positions while simultaneously investing billions in artificial intelligence. The people laughing at jokes about replacing bosses are often the same people updating their LinkedIn profiles after receiving automated termination notices.
The wrong target
The satirical website takes aim at chief executives, but the Hacker News discussion reveals that commenters actually want something different. Their complaints focus on "CEO ADHD moments" when leaders discover competitors doing something and demand immediate imitation. They describe "political games of telephone" where information gets distorted as it passes through management layers. They fantasise about bypassing the humans who schedule their meetings, approve their expenses, and ask them for status updates. These are grievances about middle management dressed in complaints about the corner office.
This matters because middle management is precisely where artificial intelligence threatens to make real inroads. Gartner, the research firm, predicts that twenty per cent of organisations will use AI to eliminate more than half of their middle management positions by 2026. A recent Harvard Business School study analysed over fifty thousand software developers using GitHub Copilot and found that AI tools reduced the time developers spent on project management tasks by ten per cent while increasing time spent on actual coding. The technology does not threaten strategic vision-setting, external relationships, or board accountability. It threatens coordination, monitoring, and information transmission: the activities that define supervisory work.
One commenter on the Hacker News thread made this explicit. "Really this is the only 10x part of GenAI that I see," they wrote, referring to claims about productivity multiplication: "increasing the number of reports exponentially by removing managers/directors, and using GenAI to understand what's going on underneath you. Get rid of the political game of telephone and get leaders closer to the ground floor."
The joke about AI chief executives misses its mark precisely because genuine executive function remains difficult to automate. Meeting with investors, presenting to boards, maintaining relationships with major customers, making judgements under genuine uncertainty: these tasks require something that language models cannot yet provide. Middle management coordination, by contrast, increasingly looks like exactly the sort of information processing that machines excel at.
An unexpected historical parallel
Two centuries ago, another group of workers directed their rage at technology that threatened their livelihoods. The Luddites, named after a possibly mythical apprentice called Ned Ludd, smashed textile machinery across northern England between 1811 and 1816. Popular memory casts them as anti-progress reactionaries, simple workers unable to accept the march of industrial civilisation.
Recent historical scholarship suggests something more complicated. The Luddites were not unskilled labourers fearing obsolescence but skilled craftspeople protecting professional status. They had completed seven-year apprenticeships and expected lifelong employment in exchange. New machinery threatened not merely their jobs but their entire system of professional identity and guild-like organisation. Historian Richard Jones of Cambridge argues that Luddism represented the concerns of privileged professionals with "disparate, local concerns" rather than a pan-working-class movement.
This reframing illuminates something about the current moment. Technology workers represent the skilled craftspeople of the digital economy. They have invested years acquiring specialised knowledge and expect compensation reflecting that expertise. When they joke about AI replacing their superiors, they perform the same psychological operation as Luddites targeting factory owners rather than the broader forces reshaping their industry. The anger flows toward visible authority figures rather than toward the structural changes that threaten everyone.
The parallel extends further. The Luddites ultimately failed not because the government crushed their rebellion—though it did, with hangings and transportations to Australia—but because factories created far more jobs than the cottage industry ever had. Those jobs paid less and demanded less skill, but they were abundant. Workers adapted because they had no alternative. The question confronting technology workers today is whether artificial intelligence will follow the same pattern: destroying existing roles while creating new ones that nobody can yet imagine.
The psychology of the punchline
Researchers who study humour describe it as a cognitive reframing mechanism. By transforming threatening situations into absurdity, jokes create psychological distance that makes fear manageable. Martin and Ford, authors of a comprehensive review of humour psychology, compare the process to a pressure valve releasing accumulated tension. You cannot easily laugh at something while simultaneously feeling overwhelmed by it.
The anthropology of high-stress occupations reveals elaborate systems of dark humour serving exactly this function. Emergency medical technicians joke about the grim circumstances they encounter. Police officers develop gallows humour about violence. Soldiers create absurdist narratives about war. These jokes serve a purpose beyond entertainment: they allow workers to acknowledge difficult realities without being crushed by them.
Technology workers have developed their own variant. The Replace Your Boss satire targets upward rather than laterally or downward, directing anxiety about automation toward authority figures rather than toward colleagues or subordinates. This psychological sleight of hand allows laughter at replacement fantasies without confronting personal vulnerability. You can mock the idea of robot executives while quietly worrying about robot software engineers.
The extensive Hacker News discussion suggests the joke performed this function imperfectly. Rather than releasing tension, it prompted extended meditation on automation's implications. Commenters debated whether shareholders would actually benefit from AI leadership, whether middle management represented legitimate value creation or mere overhead, and whether anyone could really stop the forces already set in motion. A good joke that prompts philosophy has exceeded its satirical brief.
The insider warning
Perhaps the most unsettling voice in the current discussion belongs to Dario Amodei, chief executive of Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company behind the Claude language model. In May 2025, Amodei warned that AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within five years, potentially pushing unemployment to between ten and twenty per cent. He described a potential "white-collar bloodbath" and urged governments to stop "sugar-coating" the scale of disruption approaching.
The warning carries particular weight because Amodei leads one of the companies building the technology he describes. Anthropic's latest models can work autonomously for hours on complex tasks. The company recently released systems that set new benchmarks for coding and advanced reasoning. Amodei simultaneously promotes these capabilities and warns about their consequences, embodying the contradiction that permeates the entire industry.
"We, as the producers of this technology, have a duty and an obligation to be honest about what is coming," Amodei told journalists. He acknowledged the "very strange set of dynamics" where AI leaders both build more powerful tools and privately worry about them. The situation resembles a pharmaceutical company executive warning about drug side effects while launching new products: technically consistent but psychologically jarring.
Amodei's data provides sobering context for workplace humour about automation. Anthropic tracks how users deploy its AI models, finding that roughly forty per cent now use them for automation rather than merely augmentation. That percentage continues growing. When a chief executive whose company earns revenue from replacing human cognitive labour warns about mass unemployment, the warning deserves serious attention regardless of the obvious conflicts of interest.
The unanswerable question
The viral success of Replace Your Boss captures something real about the current moment but resists easy interpretation. It could represent workers processing legitimate grievances about executive compensation by imagining algorithmic alternatives. It could reflect anxiety about automation displaced onto acceptable targets. It could simply be a moderately clever website that caught the right moment of cultural attention.
What the discussion reveals most clearly is uncertainty. Nobody knows whether AI will create more jobs than it destroys, whether the transition will be gradual or abrupt, whether displaced workers will find equivalent opportunities or suffer permanent downward mobility. The technology workers debating these questions on Hacker News are simultaneously architects and potential victims, building the systems that may eventually make their own expertise obsolete.
The Luddites received their answer within a decade: industrialisation proceeded, factories multiplied, and a new economic order emerged that bore little resemblance to the cottage industry they had defended. Whether that outcome represented progress depends on values that the market cannot adjudicate. Living standards eventually rose. Working conditions initially deteriorated. Power shifted from skilled artisans to capital owners.
The current transition may follow similar patterns or may differ in ways nobody can predict. Language models that autonomously code for seven hours suggest capabilities that extend beyond previous automation waves. They do not merely replace physical labour with machinery but replicate the cognitive work that defined professional identity for generations of knowledge workers. A factory could not write its own operating instructions. An AI system potentially can.
Beyond the joke
The Replace Your Boss website will likely fade from memory within weeks, another piece of internet ephemera that caught momentary attention before disappearing into the archives. Its real significance lies not in the satirical content but in the response it generated: hundreds of comments wrestling with questions that matter far beyond any individual website.
When software developers joke about robot executives, they reveal anxieties they cannot easily express directly. When they debate capitalism in comment threads ostensibly about a parody website, they process implications their daily work does not permit them to confront. When they simultaneously build AI tools and fear them, they embody contradictions that characterise the entire technology industry at this particular historical moment.
The joke about replacing bosses before they replace you contains a kernel of genuine insight wrapped in absurdity. Power flows in unexpected directions when technology fundamentally reorganises work. The executives who seem untouchable may prove vulnerable. The workers who build displacement tools may find themselves displaced. The Luddites thought they were defending a stable order; they were actually witnessing the birth of a new one.
What emerges from the rubble remains genuinely unknown. That uncertainty, rather than any clever satirical premise, is what made the joke resonate. People laugh at things they cannot control. And the forces reshaping work in the age of artificial intelligence appear increasingly beyond anyone's control, including the people who write the code.